Consistently imaginative, revealing and funny.

Tsui tries to preserve that human element in fits and starts throughout “Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings” but to little avail.

Saucy, sophisticated 1961 comedy. [26 Apr 1996, p.F22]

The efforts of an international cast including stars Oscar Isaac, Melanie Laurent and Nick Kroll notwithstanding, Operation Finale sounds more involving than it actually plays, ending up earnest and acceptable more than compelling.

But it's one thing to write a loving ode to your mother; another to direct an ode to an ode.

It’s without a shred of guilt that I say there is honest pleasure to be found in Before I Fall, which takes an unapologetically silly conceit and wrings from it a surprisingly nimble and affecting survey of contemporary teenage attitudes and anxieties.

Life in a Day has an earthy and at times euphoric appeal. Helping on that front is the editing artistry of Walker (and an expansive team), the man in charge of all that splicing and dicing keeps things moving at an entertaining clip.

Although children may enjoy the animal action (there's also a fun pelican and a yellow sea turtle) and parents might appreciate the movie's genuinely sweet moments, this is exceedingly mild entertainment.

Despite the story's melodramatic contrivances the creation of characters we actually care about is beyond this film's capabilities.

By selectively whittling down the novel’s interwoven time lines and characters, It Chapter Two refocuses its telling of King’s 1,100-plus-page bestseller into not just a scary clown movie — which it also is, thanks to Bill Skarsgård’s demented return as the trans-dimensional titular monster — but an elegy of memory, trauma and healing, minus the more extreme and controversial elements of the novel.

Although it occasionally feels as if the thoughtful Powell (who unexpectedly died last summer) is being forced into a repentant corner, the film remains a penetrating case study in taking ownership of one’s actions.

Stray Dolls lacks some narrative momentum, as the characters drift from petty crime to petty crime and party to party. But the film has a remarkable sense of place.

These characters need rescuing from screenwriter Colin Welland’s view of life in middle-class America as oppressively banal. By the time he gets finished sketching in the deadening of the American family, you may feel like beating Hackman to the front door...Twice in a Lifetime is a dreary masquerade of a serious movie.

For with songs like "You Can Close Your Eyes," "You've Got a Friend" and numerous others on the soundtrack, this is finally a film hard not to enjoy.

While the gangsta lyrics and posturing are laden with cliché, there's still some novelty in sustaining a rap narration for nearly two hours. But whenever the music stops, the film can never stay in the game by landing on a figurative chair.

Morgan’s arch script about the doomed love lives of the young, rich and idle in L.A. is at times a Whit Stillman-esque social satire. There’s a whiff of a whip-smart, acid-tongued Jane Austen heroine in Annette, but she’s lacking an essential ingredient: empathy.

Troop Zero is bursting with personality and stylistic flourishes; it might be too twee for some, but it’s better to let yourself be won over by its sincerity and sweetness, tempered by just enough sadness and quirk.

Kinkle's debut refreshingly sacrifices gore showpieces (though it is bloody at times) for a steadily increasing dread tied to a young woman's desperation.

What Lin restores in this mostly solid entry (which he co-wrote with Daniel Casey, both stepping in for longtime series screenwriter Chris Morgan) is a sense of emotional continuity.

Ratner seems to have found a theme that he can relate to: A terrifying trio of angry, undomesticated women who all but run away with the movie.

In a less competitive year, Jeff Goldblum would have had a shot at an Oscar nod for his performance in Adam Resurrected.

As much as we intellectually admire Jarhead, it's a cold film that only sporadically makes the kind of emotional connection it's after.

It is a disappointment coming from writer-director David Cronenberg, who has proved such a master at mind games. Cronenberg is perhaps too faithful to the book. The topic is provocative and certainly timely, but the film never achieves the incisive power of his best work, "A History of Violence" for one. Even an A-list ensemble that includes Juliette Binoche, Samantha Morton and Paul Giamatti can't save it.

Class Action s good, chewy entertainment, part courtroom pyrotechnics, part Machiavellian legal maneuvers. [15 Mar 1991]

A masterful performance by Warren Oates in the title role, but the film emerges as trite and hollow anyway. [19 Aug 1990, p.4]

Stays remarkably close to its predecessor in all the ways that count.

Made with a palpable sense of urgency, this tense, propulsive motion picture is a model of what mainstream entertainment can be like when everything goes right.

"Dark and demanding" doesn't begin to describe this devastating film -- It is not too much to say that without its splendid use of music Love Liza might not be bearable.

Swimming Upstream evokes time and place without being showy about it and offers an altogether invigorating experience.

Too much of some good things and not quite enough of others, Kansas City is the kind of film you're eager to like more than you do. It could never for an instant be mistaken for anything but a Robert Altman film, and that counts for a lot.

By getting out of the way as much as he does, Jarmusch makes Year of the Horse as much a statement about creative freedom as it is about music itself. [17 Oct 1997, p.F20]

The idea that sexual harassment is about power, not sex, and that a woman in power can potentially misbehave just like a man may be news to certain segments of the population, but they are not news enough to light a much-needed fire under this production. [9 Dec 1994, p.1]

Garcia is an utter joy to watch. His disarming lack of cynicism and optimistic disposition while in Richard’s shoes compel us to wish the humble character’s grand aspirations materialize. May Flamin’ Hot serve as testament to Garcia’s range and ability to lead a cast. Meanwhile, a marvelous Gonzalez rides a similar wavelength of cheerful determination.

The story being told lacks depth and insight; but it does have snap and polish, and it features a lot of astonishing art. In a way it’s a true Stan Lee experience.

For all the anti-colonialist sentiments expressed in Victoria & Abdul...those criticisms are ultimately subsumed in a warm, troubling glow of British Empire nostalgia.

There is a great deal of silliness about Allan's journey from start to finish and no real message other than to never stop taking life as it comes. But there is also a great deal of fun in watching a 100-year-old man climb out a window and disappear.

Cohn, an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, likely was aiming for subtlety, but these are not subtle times. Trying to get a spark from a damp match is a lot harder than holding a flame to dry kindling.

The more powerful parts of this picture have to do with their realization that people may be too eager to hear tidy stories with clear villains and conclusions — even if they’re not entirely true.

Where "Slumdog," with its signature "It is written" take on fate, implies that things happen because they must, Luck by Chance concludes that we each have a hand in determining our own destiny.

Boasting a sizable budget, stirring photography and Arcilla's charismatic lead performance, Heneral Luna would never be mistaken for more serious-minded art-house material, but there are certainly less lively ways to be taught a history lesson.

This one-of-a kind charmer casts an immediate and delightful spell.

[A] dense, disturbing and palpably angry new documentary.

There's no denying the beauty of the film's imagery, violent and tender, or the emotional power of the final moment in the boy-and-his-dog love story.

Matthiesen offers no easy answers, but The Model paints a decidedly unglamorous picture, while pulling back the curtain on the exploitative realities of the business.

Pirate Radio, the new rock-saturated comedy that proves life really is better when it's set to a '60s soundtrack, is, to borrow from the Stones, "a gas! gas! gas!"

It is only, frankly, the strength of Winslet's performance that rises above conventional surroundings and makes The Reader the experience it should be.

Year of the Dragon has an arrogant, electric energy that dares you to look away from the screen for an instant. Do so and you miss a furious piece of action that has bubbled up, seemingly out of nowhere.

Delightfully demented.

It diverts for a while, only to dissipate almost immediately upon conclusion.

While it's futile to pretend that Life Is Beautiful completely triumphs--it's simply too tough a concept to sustain--what is surprising about this unlikely film is that it succeeds as well as it does.

Even though Defamation, which is sprinkled with unexpected moments of wry humor, will be inescapably controversial, Yoav Shamir strives admirably to be evenhanded.

Scary, yet darkly funny, this thriller of the supernatural from the director of the terrific Fright Night moves with the speed of a bullet train and with style to burn. The film is a stunner--in all senses of the word.

The result is a top-drawer melodrama, a polished example of commercial movie-making that manages to improve on the original while retaining its best-selling spirit. [30 Jun 1993 Pg. F1]

The new thriller from South Korean director Park Chan-Wook is a bizarrely perverse, beautifully rendered mystery that you may or may not care to solve.

A dark and deeply unsettling movie with its roots in classical tragedy.

This amiable, old-fashioned film is no world-beater, but it underlines why, appearances with empty chairs excepted, it is always a pleasure to see this man on the screen.

Maddeningly exploitative, the film takes a provocative subject -- pedophilia -- and wraps it in a sterile, vacuum-sealed package, devoid of meaning.

Amusing and informative.

An elegant farce written and directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. At first, frankly, The Object of Beauty is not as much fun as you might expect it to be, but ends up having more to offer both the audience and Tina and Jake than either we or they suspect. [12 April 1991, p.F1]

Defiance has some genuine strengths but also some weaker elements, and these opposing traits battle it out kind of the way the contentious Bielskis fought not only the Germans but each other.

Everything about the movie is overscaled, overbrutal, overbroad, full of holes. Yet there's something cheerful and wacky about it; it's a light-hearted blood bath.

As good as Teller is as a husband in crisis, the Oscar-winning Randolph is her own commanding source of light, enough to sell this movie’s feel-good abstracts and wry commentaries on her own.

Though the movie is not without thoughtful observations on gender roles and the effects of war, Hart's characters tend to speak in poetic truths that call attention to their authorial polish. The cast breathes what life it can into the proceedings, with Otaru particularly impressive.

Highwaymen captures, through the eyes of common people, the perceived rebel spirit that made the couple folk heroes during the Great Depression. It establishes through wardrobe and production design how rough that era was. It’s not just a setting; it’s a grim and desperate worldview.

It gestures toward controversial ideas but always swerves back to a simple but profound message of togetherness and family, and the personal importance of honoring tradition and memory.

Title IX has finally hit the college party movie genre and the result is just as goofily funny and mind-bendingly stupid as its testosterone-driven predecessors.

Both a beautiful film and a disturbing one, and the connection between those two characteristics makes it the most disquieting of documentaries.

Proves as appealing as its title.

The movie creates something of the sensation of huffing industrial solvents - in a good way! - a waking-sleep zombification that can't exactly be described as pleasurable but definitely has an odd, distinct power.

The pervasive historical reenactments and voiceovers, however, while clearly well-intended, often turn this otherwise vital film into an uneasy hybrid of authenticity and artifice.

It’s a terrific film that deserves far more attention than its low-profile release is likely to receive.

As a film about punk rock, living on the edge and coming into your own, The House of Tomorrow is a strong debut from Livolsi.

Like “Winter’s Bone,” the film is at its best when it follows its heroine closely, letting the audience understand more about her life with each step closer to danger.

Shawkat's writerly voice in Duck Butter is deeply personal and probing. The film is funny and honest and Arteta, working with cinematographer Hillary Spera, balances the intimate material with a light, airy sensuality. Shawkat and Costa each give intensely powerful performances, and together they are magnetic.

With its probing camera and spare piano score, the film effectively creates a clinically sterile environment that’s as spiritually devoid as the soul of its protagonist, and while the inevitable twist ending doesn’t land with the unsettling thud it might have, getting there is quite the page-turner.

It is excruciating: a combination of Beth Henley’s insistently eccentric screenplay, Bruce Beresford’s frenzied direction and the sight of three singular talents on an acting roller coaster with no one riding the brakes.

Though the feeling sneaks up on you, The Mule has an unexpected emotional kick. That’s because in subject and execution it plays as personal as anything the filmmaker has done.

Whatever else gets tossed into the mix, Shrek must be the heart and soul. In this, Myers is a master; he makes it seem easy being green.

A series of strong emotional crosscurrents tied to the notion of winning and losing are in the hands of a very eclectic and capable cast.

Beloved is ungainly and hard to follow at times, like the proverbial giant not quite sure how to best use its strength. But that power exists, present and undeniable, and once this film gets its bearings, the unsentimental fierceness of its vision brushes obstacles and quibbles from its path.

Psycho III--better in most respects than II--lets you down with the same swampy thud at the end. It's not a catastrophe. It has some good writing, and some better-than-good acting (Perkins, Diana Scarwid, Jeff Fahey), directing (Perkins again) and camera work (Bruce Surtees). But it fails any sequel's acid test: It feeds off the original without deepening it.

Though it takes far too long to kick into gear, Bottom of the 9th does improve as it goes along, becoming less self-serious in its second half. But the upswing can’t vindicate the rest of the film; it may be about redemption, but it’s too little, too late for the movie itself.

There is so much about its package – the stars, the premise, the talented supporting cast – that would make for a film of warmth, humor and insight on the struggles of leaving the past behind and getting out of your own way on the path to fulfilment. Instead, the movie settles for being a party comedy and little else.

Includes a few scenes of impressively choreographed mayhem, but they're all but buried in Freeman and Condon's mystical grandpa and weirdo teeny bopper routines.

Sometimes it seems as if Iñárritu is literally carving out his actor's heart, so tangible does Bardem make Uxbal's fears. Iñárritu has so much that he wants to say - too much, in fact, and the film's central weakness - that he has created an emotional tsunami for both the actors and the audience.

By turns hysterical, heretical, guilty, innocent, silly, sophisticated, teasing and tedious.

All dressed up with no particular place to go, this 22nd Bond film tries hard but ends up an underachiever.

Though the film is completely worth seeing just to experience such a totally realized performance and hear Gilroy's always sharp dialogue, the reality and complexity of the character turns out to clash with plotting that is not as convincing.

Unconventional, imaginative, nothing if not audacious, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life is a portrait of creativity from the inside, a serious yet playful attempt to find an artistic way to tell an emotional truth.

An entertaining and insightful portrait of boyhood.

If this strikes some as some kind of gallingly blasé, ostentatious Parisian sophistication, it's far from it.

Ostensibly exploring a monumental what-if in a musician's life — a late-career reckoning that aims to make up for lost time — the movie is itself a missed opportunity, especially given that it stars Al Pacino.

A finely acted, often deeply emotional period piece that, despite its share of strong moments, stacks the deck too much for its own dramatic good.

The movie’s central idea and bright young cast are so good that some of its shallowness is forgivable.

The story is deceptively simple. However, built around a universal quandary of our tech-obsessed modern world, underpinned with a folkloric tale that appeals to our most primal child selves — yearning for acceptance and connection — it has a heavy metaphorical resonance.

There is a lot to savor in Rise of the Guardians, but sometimes too much of a good thing can be exhausting.